Dare To Be Random

Monday, February 06, 2012

Okay this is one of a stairway that I think creates a minor bit of vertigo upside down because you only see stairs this way after a long night of St. Patrick's Day cheer or after a particularly good wedding reception.

But 4 reelz! These damn assignments are going to kill me! Do you realize that making a 50 year-old man, who is not the natural born athlete that he once was, go upside down and then take a picture is just unconscionable? I nearly broke my neck!

I had some philosophical issues with this assignment too. Eventually something by some entity will see anything upside down. It might be a bird, or some observer from another dimension or planet, or a dust mite or bug but some being will see almost everything upside down at one time or another. But we are meant to photograph things that are NEVER seen upside down. Never is a long time. Geologically, in a couple of million years, everything that we know will have changed.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Emily D. asked me in the comments about how to add a twitter feed to a blog. This used to be easier to see at Twitter.Com. Now you have to go to the bottom of your home page in Twitter Image via Wikipedia

I changed the color and some other parameters then clicked on "Finish and Grab Code"

Now the code it gives can be used anywhere that one can use any HTML. In Wordpress, go to "Widgets" and choose "Text." Drop the code in and it will work. You may need to adjust the code for your template if the Twitter window is too wide.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

This really was an amazing day. J made sourdough waffles and we listened to Django Rheinhart. We went to the gym and had a great work-out and then made up for it by splitting a bottle of Cote Du Rhone in Brio Cafe in Arcata. Life is good.

This is an assignment for DS 106. We are to read the essay "A Personal Cyberinfrastructure" and the video at the bottom of this posting, both by Gardener Campbell. I first saw the video at an Open Education conference in Utah last year. I like this guy. Being in lower-middle management in a college, I totally relate to the "what part of 'bag of gold' don't you understand."

I have always been a fan of McLuhan. There are so many things that he got right. "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." and another favorite quote: "We drive into the future using only our rear-view mirror."

A lot of the way that colleges are set up work against implementing innovation and change. You do not get tenure by being a mavrick. You get it by playing well with others. You do not get funded for trying something that no one has done before. If you are getting funding for something completely new, it is because you wrote the grant application in such a way that it assured everyone reading it that things were going to tick along the same old way as before.

Networking skills are now metacognitive skills.

I am not sure how I feel about the idea of having students set up their own domains. This is just going to keep the cost of education up. I am constantly working on open textbooks, OERs, and free resources - it feels counter to all of that to now send them to GoDaddy. It is important to have the students understand the infrastructure of the internet. They need the knowledge and some of those skills to allow them ownership of the experience. But I would like to see free domains for education. If we can have open textbooks, why can't we have an open internet? How is wrestling with GoDaddy.com (and paying them) going to really help? How domains are set up should not be a mystery. Someone should do that if they want and not fear the technology. But then again, we are not making them build a PBX board to manage their phone calls.

I am not sure how much control students really have over their domains just by paying for a hosting service that is running scripts. No one ever made me take a typewriter repair class when I became an English major in the 80s.

I signed up for a free webhosting service. I think it is called 000webhostingripoff.com or something like that. It made a big deal about having the c panel available. When you get into your free account and try to click on the Fantastico installer, a message pops up that says that "this upgrade is coming soon to the free accounts. You can access it now in a paid account."

Lets get some colleges together and build our own freaking internet. I miss gopher space and I got all misty-eyed when I was in IRC last week via the DS106 web interface.

As Nietzsche writes, one must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star.

The essay made me think about my own relationship and history with technology. I was one of those folks who gave workshops on HTML for instructors. There were a lot of grants in those days for that kind of thing. Before then though, as a student in the late 70s and early 80s, I used to walk to the local community college with a cassette tape in one pocket and some xeroxed programs in BASIC stuffed into another. The computers were TRS-80s (black screen, white letters, feel the love). They had tape drives. There were no log-ins or usernames.

Friday, January 27, 2012

My sister Shannon told me this joke. As a matter of fact, my dear saintly sister told me pretty much all of my favorite jokes - I will share the walking on water jokes later. Here is the Last Supper joke:

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

What was interesting to me about doing this assignment is that it wasn't until afterwards that I realized that I didn't miss my car keys! That is hard to imagine. My house was burglarized in October of last year and they took my car as well. While I liked owning the car, we are a two person house-hold and there really is no reason for it anymore. When we both worked at multiple colleges (we were both English adjuncts), we had to have two cars. Don't really miss all that though.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Okay, so I did the assignment where we are supposed to film ourselves doing a tongue twister on the first take. Here is my video:

Okay now here is my challenge - go to your YouTube account and click on your video. You should see a button that says "Edit captions/subtitles." Click on that and then click on the "English" link (next to the pencil). This will give you an automatically written Surrealist-Dada version of the tongue twister:

00:05
the clock likes lakes duke stuck likes
lakes
00:09
do likely to lakes
00:11
luxe dot clicks lakes
00:13
luck takes weeks in lakes luke what
likes
00:17
the clinton takes leaks
00:19
intakes duck likes
00:22
in lakes typewriter tell us all final
sentence
00:26
and that was the one that you wanted to
use it
00:29
tenants sick man critical tree like that
00:34
dot collecting insist
00:36
effect all mean you where is getting
into the forest service

That is an honest-to-god unedited transcript from YouTube. God I miss Clinton....

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Image via Wikipedia
There is a statue in the Arcata Plaza of William McKinley. Very few people in the area seem to know why it is there. There is a lot of myth and drama surrounding McKinley. I have heard from locals that he was responsible for punitive raids against the local Indians (untrue) and that he visited here (also untrue). The statue was meant to go up in San Francisco, but never did and I have heard many conflicting stories about why that was so. One of the most self-explanatory reasons is that the statue is dated 1906 as in "1906 Earthquake." When McKinley was assassinated, there were schools and monuments put up and this is one. There is a nearby town that was also named after McKinley. The locals have an odd relationship with this statue. They take pretty good care of it. Unlike the statue of Abraham Lincoln in Lithia Park in Ashland, OR which has now fallen headlessly to the relentless on-slaught of the local Vandals, McKinley seems to survive year after year of Halloween festoonery.